The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  New ending, I would say, and press a finger to shut the lower lip of his astonished mouth. The equestrienne steals the angel wings. And then the wings would swing shut around us both.

  And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates.

  The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.

  Historical Notes and Acknowledgments

  This novel began one day in 1999 after a conversation with the late David Rakoff on the street in the East Village of New York City. He told me a long story about the opera singer Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, starting with her discovery as a child at her music lesson, overheard from the street, and ending with her mysterious early retirement and her subsequent two-year farewell tour of America promoted by P. T. Barnum—a tour that left her a very rich woman.

  I am pretty sure David called her a nineteenth-century Cher.

  By the time I got home that day, I had an image of an opera singer on a train, singing in a circus at night, and making her way across the United States, her life full of secrets.

  A little research quickly showed that what I’d imagined wasn’t anything like the real Jenny’s life. But I liked my shadow Jenny better—and I knew she was the seed of a novel.

  I still don’t know why David told me that story. I just know that if he hadn’t, I would never have written this novel. I cannot express how much I regret that I did not finish in time for him to read it. Any acknowledgments could only begin with him.

  §

  This is a work of fiction. Lilliet bears only the lightest resemblance to Jenny Lind—she is not Swedish, but American born, and sings in an era where Jenny Lind is a vivid memory, not a rival. If she is meant to resemble anyone, it is Pamina, from The Magic Flute—this book is meant as a reinvention of the Mozart opera as a novel.

  There are many historical figures in these pages, however, and many texts proved invaluable as a resource. I have listed them in order of appearance with any credits regarding sources.

  Giuseppe and Giuseppina Verdi came to life for me first in the letters of Giuseppina Verdi, translated as a part of Hans Busch’s Verdi’s “Aida”: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents; I was also aided by Verdi: A Biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz.

  The scene with Cora Pearl’s famous performances in Orpheé aux Enfers and then her party afterward is a fiction based on a fiction and derives from the description of the performance and afterparty that appeared in Zola’s Nana—Zola based Nana partly on Cora, but had Nana sing the role in his novel. Some of those performance details were confirmed in Cora Pearl’s autobiography, The Memoirs of Cora Pearl.

  The description of Eau de Lubin was made possible by the distinguished French perfume house Lubin, who shared their ancient recipe with me; I am grateful to them, Colleen Williams, and Barbara Herman, who put me in touch with Lubin as the scent is allergenic and so isn’t available now; thank you also to Brian Chambers, who helped me understand how the fragrance would wear.

  The character of the Comtesse de Castiglione was drawn in large part from “La Divine Comtesse”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, the catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show of the photographs Pierre-Louis Pierson took of the Comtesse. One of those photographs, from the series called “The Opera Ball,” is used in the cover design with permission from the Metropolitan, and I’m especially grateful to them for this, and to the designer of the cover, which I love. Thank you also to all of the contributing scholars: Philippe de Montebello, Pierre Apraxine, Xavier Demange, Françoise Heilbrun, and Michele Falzone del Barbarò. As I read their catalogue essays and footnotes, a picture appeared of a woman who was often underestimated as decorative all while she wielded tremendous political influence—and who was also not without wit and an eye for revenge. Very little of the political role of the Comtesse was invented—she really was sent at nineteen by the Italian embassy to seduce the Emperor Napoleon III to Italian reunification; she was blamed partly for the assassination attempt on his life as it was thought she controlled the Italian assassins hidden in Paris; she had a Prussian prince friend who took her to the showing of her portrait by Pierson in a boat along the Seine; she was in weekly mail contact with Adolphe Thiers over the three years leading up to the destruction of the Second Empire; she befriended the Orleanists; she appears to have met with Bismarck to spare Paris from shelling; after she returned to Paris, she lived for quite some time protected by the Paris police, on orders from her correspondent Adolphe Thiers. Her apartments in this novel are imagined as much as they could be from the available descriptions in the catalogue. It is my hope that this story respects her for being the political spymaster she appears to have been, at home and abroad, even if the plot is imagined. This plot is the sort of assertion a historian can’t make, but that a novelist can.

  For the Tuileries Palace details and the details of the lives of the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, I relied on Life in the Tuileries Under the Second Empire, By Anna Bicknell, An Inmate of the Palace, the autobiography of a British governess to the Duke and Duchess de Tascher. The story of the parrot who learned to swear from her maid’s lovers comes from there, as well as my portrait of Pepa, the Empress’s confidante, and the noble sisters who hated her, and also my description of all of the Empress’s habits at the Tuileries. For the Empress at Compiègne, I used In the Courts of Memory, the letters of Lillie Moulton, the American soprano and wife of Charles Moulton; she was a close friend to the Emperor and Empress, and a regular guest at the imperial series at Compiègne. From her letters came the stories of the Empress sitting in war councils in the afternoons, her ladies-in-waiting angry at the snub; the schedule of the day; the hunts in a given week; the costume balls and skits and affairs. The poupée dérangée scene is drawn from the letters most closely, in particular the joke made by the Prince Metternich and the lyrics to the songs. That scene in her letters occurred at approximately the time Lilliet would have been in the palace, so I knew I had to put Lilliet into it. Moulton’s letters are also the inspiration for the guest character the tenor tries to seduce, though there is no sign she was ever unfaithful to her husband in life. I don’t use her name in the story, but I hope Moulton is enjoying one last pantomime in disguise from the beyond. I mean that character as a tribute to her.

  Moulton also kept careful record of her lessons with Delsarte and Pauline Viardot-García’s brother in those letters, which contributed to the novel as well.

  The gossip in the Tuileries Palace comes primarily from the Bicknell but also from Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in particular from their records of the regular complaints of the Princess Mathilde. I also drew from those diaries for the details of Lilliet’s life during the Siege and the Commune. Alistair Horne’s The Fall of Paris was especially valuable for the way it described Paris’s preparations for the Franco–Prussian War and the Amazons of the Seine program. The list of furs left behind when the Empress fled was republished in Rupert Christiansen’s Paris Babylon from a British newspaper at the time, and I altered it with the addition of the otter Lilliet steals and places in her room. I also relied on his Tales of the New Babylon for information, timeline, and local color during the Siege and the Commune.

  The details of the intimate life of the Turgenev and Viardot-García set in Baden-Baden—and the collaboration between Turgenev and Viardot-García—come from the works of Patrick Waddington, in particular his monograph A Probable Detente. Most of this is available through JSTOR, along with Viardot-García’s letters, translated by Waddington. These were the model for the letters by Pauline, and so thank you also to JSTOR. The portrait of Pauline’s teaching methods and the teaching book of exercises come from her own published course book.

  The Waddington monograph was also my source for details about George Sand’s home life at Nohant, as were her autobiography, and her published diary. The German traveling version of Hamlet performed at Nohant is that much
shorter version, Fratricide Punished, the Johannes Velten text. The Queen of the Night speech Lilliet reads aloud is my own translation, but the Furies lines are taken from the 1905 translation by Horace Howard Furness, available online, which were poetically superior.

  The details of the war and the flight from Baden-Baden came from Waddington again and also from Turgenev’s letters, published as Turgenev’s Letters, the edition edited and translated by Edgar H. Lehrman. The portrait of Bizet and the scandal around Carmen derives in large part from Winton Dean’s Georges Bizet: His Life and Work, and the introduction to Céleste Mogador’s autobiography—Mogador was believed to be Bizet’s muse for Carmen.

  I am also indebted to the following: Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Emile Zola’s The Kill and the Penguin Classic edition of Zola’s Nana, translated by George Holden; Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Lucy Johnston; Strapless by Deborah Davis; My Blue Notebooks by Liane de Pougy; Evenings with the Orchestra by Hector Berlioz; The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson; Courtesans by Katie Hickman; Grandes Horizontales by Virginia Rounding; Napoleon III and Eugénie by Jasper Ridley; The Price of Genius by April Fitzlyon; Sarah Bernhardt’s memoirs, My Double Life; Mitsou by Colette, and her collected stories, also Chéri and The Last of Chéri, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances; The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top by Janet Davis; The Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Céleste Mogador; Bertrand Bonello’s excellent film House of Pleasures, and the two-volume graphic novel Miss Don’t Touch Me by Hubert and Kerascoet; and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys.

  The opera lyrics quoted here are from my own translations.

  As characters, Euphrosyne, the tenor, and the Prince are all imaginary. Aristafeo and his dogs, the Lords of the Lower Garden, appeared to me in a dream.

  §

  Thank you to my partner, Dustin Schell, who read drafts, made dinners, did laundry, paid the bills, talked me down off of whatever ledge I had managed to get on, and still met me with champagne when I was done. His love changed my life, and his readings dramatically improved the novel. I will thank him for the rest of my life, but here especially.

  Thank you to my beautiful family, who were so patient despite the many vacations ruined by drafts and deadlines; thank you to my late father, Choung Tai Chee, who brought me up to love Italian opera and Russian novels, and thank you to my mother, whose stories of her childhood and her family informed the creation of Lilliet.

  Thank you to my agent, Jin Auh, who I cannot thank enough, and everyone at the Wylie Agency. Jin loved this novel from the first few pages I sent a very long time ago and is the only person who’s read this novel anywhere near as often as I have. I am so grateful for her enduring enthusiasm and her wisdom and hard work.

  Thank you to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt but especially to my editors: Webster Younce, who acquired it; Andrea Schulz, for her enthusiasm and patience despite receiving me as an orphan, and her determination to bring this novel out; and to Naomi Gibbs, who has seen it in so many forms and whose thoughtful work on its intricacies made this final version possible. I’m very grateful to them all. Thank you to Marian Ryan and David Hough, my copyeditors, on the first and second rounds, respectively—the novel is buttoned up and ready for the ball because of you.

  I am very grateful for the support this novel received from fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Whiting Foundation; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the MacDowell Colony; Ledig House; the Civitella Ranieri Foundation; the Hermitage in Englewood, Florida; and the University of Leipzig. I am also indebted to many museums and libraries: the University of Rochester Library and Special Collections; Amherst College’s Frost Library and Special Collections; the Performing Arts Library of New York at Lincoln Center; the special collections of the New York Public Library; the British Library; the Butler Library at Columbia; the Museum of Fashion in Paris; the Museum of the Decorative Arts; the Musée Nissim de Camondo; the Musée Carnavalet; the Musée Cognacq-Jay; the museum of the Empress Eugénie at Compiègne; the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This novel owes a special debt to the Center for Fiction Library, where much of it was written—thank you especially to Noreen Tomassi, Kristin Henley, Christopher Messer, and Matt Nelson.

  I am very grateful to the many friends who helped with this novel. Thank you to Shauna Seliy, Kirsten Bakis, Patrick Nolan, Stan Parish, Steve Chasey, Melanie Fallon, Katie Horowitz, Rhonda Pressley Veit, Patrick Merla, Maud Newton, Catherine Chung, and Anna Keesey—you all provided much needed readings, encouragement, and insights. Thank you to Lauren Cerand for your faith in me and this novel. Thank you to Madalyn Aslan, who introduced me to the Falcon soprano legends. Thank you to Scott Miller for telling me about the superstitions of seamstresses. Thank you to Kera Bolonik, Meredith Clair, and Theo Bolonik, my Camp Knotty Pines family. Thank you to Chris Offutt, Roxana Robinson, Honor Moore, Liz Harris, and Anne Greene, my Wesleyan Writers Conference cofaculty who were such good listeners to this novel over the years, for their feedback and enthusiasm. A special thank-you to Edmund White, who helped me understand courtesans best of all. Thank you to Jami Attenberg, who made a pact with me to finish this novel—it helped. Thank you to Josef Asteinza for assistance with my research in Paris. Thank you to Gerard Koskovich for your many insights and historical research assistance. Thank you to Paula Lee for your general fact-check regarding France in the nineteenth century. Thank you to my Amherst College family: Daniel Hall, Peng Yew Chin, Judy Frank, Catherine Newman, Cathy Ciepiela, Marisa Parham, John Drabinski, John Hennessy, Gabe and Nick Hennessy-Murray, John Urschel, Sydne Didier, Ron Rosbottom. Special thanks to Anston Bosman for the night we dressed up in sheets and played at being Hamlet—this inspired the scene at Nohant. Thank you to Barry O’Connell for the loan of his writing carrel in Frost Library while I was the Visiting Writer at Amherst—it was a glorious refuge. Thank you to Sabina Murray for the long talks about writing historical fiction and research. Thank you to the Amherst coffee crew—Mukunda Feldman; his wife, Kylie Feldman; Jay Venezia; Andrew Sanni; Jeremy Browne; Marisa Eva; Martin O’Malley; Claire Kavanagh; and Nick Brown—you all kept me good company. In Paris, special thanks are due to Matthew Hicks, my consummate guide to Paris, and Pascal Touin-Stratigeas, his husband, who together told me of the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes and inspired the scene set there. In Detroit, thank you to Leon Johnson and Megan McConnell, Marlowe and Leander Johnson, and the Salt and Cedar Press crew. In Leipzig, thank you to Jennifer Porto, Andrew Curry, Avery Jennings, and Timothy Fallon, who told me about the heldentenor. In Berlin, thank you to Bill Martin, Libby Bunn Neuemann, Peer Neuemann, and Daniel Schreiber.

  And finally, thank you to my readers, especially those of you who checked in over the years, waiting for this book. I’m grateful to you all.

  Visit www.hmhco.com or your favorite retailer to order the book.

  About the Author

  ALEXANDER CHEE won a Whiting Award for his first novel, Edinburgh, and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and on NPR, among others, and he is a contributing editor at the New Republic. He lives in New York City.